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Susan B. Anthony was a renowned activist for
temperance, labor rights, educational reform, abolition, and most famously,
women’s rights. Her work writing and
speaking on behalf of these reforms convinced her that women needed the right
to vote to truly influence legislation. A leader of the woman suffrage movement, Anthony was
arrested in Rochester, NY in 1872 for voting in an election. She founded the American Equal Rights
Association in 1866, which eventually became the National American Woman
Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Anthony was serving as honorary president of
NAWSA at the time she wrote this letter in 1901. Eliza Grier was born into the last years of
slavery in North Carolina in 1862. She went on work her way through Fisk University
in Tennessee and then attended Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania on
scholarship, graduating with her MD in 1897.
She eventually set up a practice in Greenville, South Carolina, serving
an impoverished community.

In her letter to WMCP, Anthony sympathizes with Grier and
her plight, and acknowledges the hardship and difficulty of Grier’s endeavor to
practice medicine in adverse circumstances. The fact that Anthony, a prominent
white woman and perhaps the most famous women’s rights advocate of the time,
responded to the appeal of Grier (albeit to Grier’s alma mater and not to Grier
herself), an African American woman born into slavery but pursuing a
professional demonstrates
how women of disparate backgrounds found some common cause and mutual sympathy
in the struggle to gain equal rights in all aspects of life, including in
careers and the professions.

Cite this source: Title of document, date. Eliza Grier and Matilda Evans: Two Women, Two Paths. Doctor or Doctress?: Explore American history through the eyes of women physicians. The Legacy Center, Drexel University College of Medicine Archives & Special Collections. Philadelphia, PA. Date of access. http://lcdc.library.drexel.edu/islandora/object/islandora:971